Within a few months outward opening doors flew open to the streets around a world.
Everybody knew about outward opening doors before.
They had the spirit of outward opening doors. But the machinery for making everybody know that they knew it—the moral and spiritual machinery for lifting over the doors of a world and making them all swing suddenly generation after generation the other way, had not been set up.
Of course it would have been better if there had been three hundred dead bodies or three dead bodies—but the principle holds good—let the moral plates be cast and the huge moral values follow with comparatively little individual moral hand labour. The moral hand labour moves on to more original things.
The same principle holds good in letting an American city be good in seeing how to make goodness in a city work.
Let the plates be once cast—say Galveston, Texas; or De Moines, Iowa, and goodness after you have your first specimen gets national automatically.
Two hundred and five cities have adopted the Galveston or commission government in three years.
The failure for the time being apparently of the more noble and aggressive kinds of goodness against the forces of evil is a matter of technique. Our failure is not due to our failure to know what evil really is, but due to our wasteful way of tunnelling through it.
Our religious inventors have failed to use the most scientific method. We have gone at the matter of butting through evil without thinking enough. Less butting and more thinking is our religion now. We will not try any longer to butt a whole planet when we try to keep one man from doing wrong.